Cicero—Rome’s Greatest Orator—Saved the Capital From Insurrection, But Couldn’t Save the Republic From Collapse

On December 7, 43 BCE, a sixty-three-year-old man was carried in a litter down a woodland path near the Italian coast, fleeing soldiers who had been sent to kill him. When they caught up, he ordered his attendants to set down the litter, put his head out, and offered them his neck. They cut it off, along with the hand that had written the fourteen speeches attacking Mark Antony. The head and hand were nailed to the rostra in the Roman Forum, the speaker's platform from which that same voice had held Rome in thrall for nearly four decades. Antony's wife Fulvia took the severed head in her lap, forced open the mouth, and pierced the tongue with her hairpins. The tongue was the weapon that had wounded her husband most.

Today's guest is Catharine Edwards, author of Cicero's Tongue: The Life of Rome's Greatest Orator and the End of the Republic. We discuss how a small-town outsider from Arpinum conquered Roman politics with nothing but his voice and was mocked as an upstart for the rest of his life, why the bloodbath of the Marius-Sulla civil wars traumatized a teenage Cicero so deeply that he spent the next forty years trying to prevent it from happening again, and how the trial of the corrupt governor Verres made Cicero the most famous advocate in Rome while revealing the scale of imperial plunder he never fundamentally challenged. We look at why the Catiline conspiracy made him "father of the fatherland" but also planted the seed of his exile, how his fourteen Philippics against Antony were delivered by a man whose lung capacity was failing and who knew the speeches would probably get him killed, and why his fatal miscalculation was betting everything on a nineteen-year-old named Octavian he thought he could control. Edwards argues that Cicero's tragedy is inseparable from the Republic's: a man who believed passionately that persuasion could solve any crisis, confronted by opponents who had discovered that violence was faster.

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